Raclette and Time stamping

[Paul Telco]

Dad,

Nope, never heard of 'Tartiflette'. I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise
that there is a French version of Raclette. The website is strange isn't it?
On the one hand it is a demonstration of simple self-drive web authoring and
on the other hand it has some excellent looking recipes. Maybe a husband and
wife team is behind it?

Date stamping. Hmm. I can't think of an off the shelf answer to this.
Character insertion is not difficult and is just a keying job. The insertion
could be done by a device very similar to the one you already use for the
split screen. How to derive the time data and present it ready for keying is
harder but not impossible.

You could start from scratch and have a pic doing lookups in ROM to produce
pre-saved characters. Then read the ROM out a tv line at a time for keying.

It may be worth looking for simple graphics/text chipsets aimed at crt
displays like those found in simple arcade games and car park ticketing
machines. Once you have a synchronised (genlocked) picture with the time on
it then you can easily key it over the camera output.

You may find everything you need from a 'Teletext' chipset. It's a well
defined standard for use in 525 and 625 systems and there are a lot of chips
to do with deriving time and data for overlaying on pictures. The advantage
here is that it is aimed at TV set manufacturing and this is a notoriously
low cost/low component count field.

Hope this helps,

Paul